Smack a label on an apple to make sure people understand it's a Golden Delicious and not a Granny Smith, it's still an apple. "Literary fiction" is full of works that can be more narrowly defined in genre and often distilled further into sub-genre. Then you have the genre-benders that don't follow a template for a novel is this or it's that. And equating "genre" as more correctly being labeled "commercial" is presuming that writers whose work skews toward a particular, well-defined genre is only looking for commercial success. And it gets very elitist and snobbish from there.
Born to sell, these novels stick to the trite-and-true, relying on stock characters whose thoughts spool out in Lifetime platitudes. There will be exceptions, as there are in every field, but, for the most part, the standard genre or commercial novel isn’t going to break the sea frozen inside us. If this sounds condescending, so be it. Commercial novels, in general, whether they’re thrillers or romance or science fiction, employ language that is at best undistinguished and at worst characterized by a jejune mentality and a tendency to state the obvious. Which is not to say that some literary novels, as more than a few readers pointed out to me, do not contain a surfeit of decorative description, elaborate psychologizing, and gleams of self-conscious irony. To which I say: so what?
AND THEN, he ends on a serious high note:
...good commercial fiction is inferior to good literary fiction in the same way that Santa Claus is inferior to Wotan. One brings us fun or frightening gifts, the other requires—and repays—observance.
So. To recap:
Article writer thinks genre fiction is kind of rubbish, its readers are troglodytes and he hates Santa Claus.
I hope he gets coal for Christmas. FOREVER.
"He's right. I'm a pale shadow of a mythical Norse god. My whole existence has been a lie."
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